Now if you’ll excuse me: I have a mosquito to kill.

Posted by J.R.

October 9, 2009

The room is laptop-lit, and the October air is friendly. If I dangle my chillum from my knuckles in front of the window, I can’t help but adjust my fist to slide the tip in line with one of the twin tangerine dots of light marking the other side of the street. The lights are for the front door of one of my neighbors’ houses, but that doesn’t matter. The air is what matters. The state of mind it induces; the memories–sights and sounds of a dead time–are lovely, and childhood seems very near. It’s not that I require an escapism from now in yesterday’s business.

No.

I merely mount the frame of those experiences on the windowsill: among the old dust and insect corpses which stand as a macabre, as-yet ineffective ward against live insects. Perhaps if their bodies pile high enough, the bastards will evolve away from trying to be around me.

This is a wonderful time. I am quite happy. The Appalachian mountain bugs sing a melancholy song that drifts pleasantly through the enormous square passageways of my screened windows of six-legged terror. Across the street and to the side, my neighbor in the cluttered house has an enormous bug zapper lantern. It is no wonder that they are not afraid of me: these fuckers are seasoned veterans of a kamikaze world they were designed to conquer.

If there is anything that can be learned from our position in the world (relative to mass), it is that smaller size supplies suffering to larger entities. Whether more have died by the boulder than the bullet, I am unsure–but entropy has certainly won out over them all (although malaria is up there). With nanotechnology and a ripe supply of fissionable nuclear materials, humanity may make a stab at catching up: starting with the most awesome wasp nest destruction (WND) devices ever known.

I am convinced that the collective human unconscious has an ingrained racial bias against bugs. Bug is a synonym for annoyance. Cockroach is an African insult implying racial inferiority. We abhor biological weapons for use against humans, but we will sell them to minors for use against insects in convenience stores. Poison is for bugs. Right? It’s pretty sick.

Robert Heinlein, Orson Scott Card, and Dan O’Bannon have all made serious bank from bug hate. Heinlein addresses our most pathetic fantasy: a world where the bugs are a mortal enemy against whom our entire species militarizes to fight. Watchmen took the philological approach to this concept, but the idea that it’ll take evil bugs to get us to cooperate speaks so optimistically of humanity that I can’t help but be enamoured of it. Card evokes the same images of organized xenocide, but does so with a conscience: after the bugs are slaughtered, they are romanticized like 20th century Native Americans–but not until then. O’Bannon had a goddamn nightmare about killer bugs born to do unspeakable things to human beings. It’s undeniable: in many of our darkest thoughts… there are bugs. Wicked bugs. In District 9 they were popping like popcorn for our conscience. Millions sold.

I hear a cat meowing outside the window. Now that I’m focused on the sounds again, I hear a motorcycle driving down in the valley. I wonder if its rider’s face is getting splattered with bugs. I hope his face ruins them all. Is this evil?

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